The Global South, Zionism, and Digital Colonialism: Dr. Rachel Z. Feldman on Noahidism
By: Ollie Axelrod, Staff Writer
“More than any people on this Earth, you people here are the witnesses of the Lord. For you people are those for whom the world was created. The people to witness that there is one God.”
This is how radical Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahana began his keynote address for the first international Noahide conference at Fort Worth, Texas in 1990, only seven months before he was assassinated.
Noahidism is a movement within Christian Zionism that advocates for “[letting] go of Jesus” and abiding by the seven rules of Noah, a fundamental basis for Orthodox Jewish law. However, Noahides are not Jews and often do not wish to be Jews. Instead, their religious practice is a demonstration of devotion to the “separate and divinely enstated statuses” of Jews and gentiles “in the Torah” in bringing in the biblical prophecy of the Messianic age.
During her guest lecture on February 27th, Dartmouth anthropologist Dr. Rachel Z Feldman illustrated the Israeli Third Temple Movement’s imperative role in the recent popularization of Noahidism. The Third Temple Movement is a radical Zionist organization that “strives to physically rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem” and “transform Israel into a biblical-style theocracy”. According to biblical prophecy, the Third Temple is the house of God, where the messiah would reign and bring universal peace during the Messianic era. Thus, the Third Temple Movement motivates its followers with the “ultimate goal of initiating messianic times for all of humanity.”
It’s likely that you’ve never heard of Noahidism before: it gained traction in the late twentieth century and is today made up of only tens of thousands of followers. However, contemporary Noahidism is assembling an international scope that has made it a “major threat to peace”, according to Dr. Feldman, who has spent the past ten years of her life observing rapidly growing Noahide communities across the global south who receive religious counsel from Israeli Zionist rabbis over the internet.
Many of the Noahids in post-colonial Africa, Asia, and Latin America describe their renouncement of Christianity as a “personal decolonization”. Others, however, see Noahidism as a “viable alternative” for Orthodox conversion, which is an intensive process that “requires long-term study and relocation to an observant community in walking distance to a synagogue on Shabbat” and is inaccessible to much of the global south “for a number of geographic, logistical, and economic reasons”. Dr. Feldman reflected on a conversation that she had with one Noahide from Mexico City that remarked that he “sometimes…wonders if the Noahide has become the poor man’s Jew.”
Dr. Feldman concluded her speech with the argument that Noahidism is a “decentralized…colonialism”, unified around the mythology of a place that does not exist beyond TTM rhetoric and photoshopped reconstructions on Facebook. In this, she considers Noahidisim to be a mammoth feat of “futurescaping” made possible only by the digital landscape.
Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary will be released in Spring 2024 by Rutgers Press.
